CHAPTER 2464 INSIDER KNOWLEDGE
An hour had passed since the inception of the Beast Incursion.
According to the Beggar's Sect's estimation, a bare minimum of many hundreds of millions of human beings had already perished. Trillions of gold worth of capital had been destroyed and vast swathes of land beyond any fathoming had been annexed by the Beast Incursion, entirely swept over by the frenzied beasts emerging from the Beast Domain.
In the span of an hour, the Beast Incursion inflicted more damage to humanity than the entirety of the third Great East Panamic War had. It inflicted more damage to human civilizations than the wars that had been fought within human civilization.
It was a crisis unlike anything the world had ever seen. Never before had countless frenzied beasts and monsters emerge from the depths of the Beast Domain, sweeping across the entirety of the Human Domain.
The world soon came to learn just how devastating the Beast Incursion could be. The intelligence community across the entirety of human civilization documented the horrors of the Beast Incursion and delivered detailed reports of the most destructive and devastating impacts, leaving every nation wary of the attack's eventual expansion.
The first and most horrifying aspect of the Beast Incursion was that it was a sustained incursion rather than a single wave. This meant that beasts and monsters continued to pour out of the Beast Domain without any end or signs of stopping.
If anything, it appeared as though the beasts and monsters only exited the domain faster and faster.
This turned the crisis from an acute crisis to something that could potentially be more chronic and long-term. Among the worst possibilities was that this would simply become a new reality from humanity as the Beast Domain somehow managed to continue pushing out an endless supply of beasts and monsters. It wasn't that there were infinite beasts and monsters within the Beast Domain, but that the region was an exceptionally dense biosphere. This was a consequence of human civilization pushing and pushing them further and further into the Beast Domain. Despite being smaller in size compared to the Human Domain, its population was very high. Belongs to (N)ôvel/Drama.Org.
Another horrifying element of the Beast Incursion that human civilization had learned the hard way was the state of mind of the beasts and monsters that emerged.
They were in a frenzy.
A frenzy that had deprived them of survival instincts and self-preservation.
One could inflict more harm to another if one simply stopped caring for one's health and well-being.
The beasts and monsters emerging from the Beast Domain were doing just that. They charged, stampeded, and rampaged without any care for the damage they directly and indirectly inflicted on themselves in the process.
This made them far more dangerous than beasts and monsters were normally thought to be, increasing the threat-level of each individual creature. This, in turn, led to an abnormally high mortality rate among Martial Artists when normal tactics of intimidation and leveraging self-preservation all completely failed.
The wealth of knowledge and experience that hunter-class Martial Artists had with beasts and monsters was compromised. They soon realized, the hard way, that they were dealing with an entirely different beast, literally and figuratively.
Another truly terrifying aspect was that while the beasts were in a frenzy, their frenzy was directed exclusively towards human beings for some reason. Apex predators charged alongside herbivores as both did their best to inflict damage upon human beings.
This was what shocked the ecologists and zoologists that had received a flood of emergency intelligence reports.
By definition, frenzies were chaotic. they could not be directed and any creature in a frenzy was simply a universal threat to itself and everything around it.
This was common wisdom in academic circles in relevant fields.
Yet, the Beast Incursion defied all known understanding of zoological behavioral psychology!
No one was able to make heads or tails of why the beasts and monsters targeted and directed their frenzy towards humans and only humans. Regardless of the reason, however, it didn't change the fact that it was a horrific turn of events.
While the beasts and monsters of the Beast Domain were known to occasionally cooperate against Martial Artists, they had never ever even come close to forming such a unified warfront against all of human civilization.
Just this shocking change alone horrified the ruling class and political sphere of humanity as well as the Martial World even as they desperately scrambled to protect human civilization from the horrors of the Beast Incursion.
It meant that the Beast Domain was now many times more dangerous than it had ever been. One of the reasons that human civilization viewed themselves as superior to the might of the Beast Domain was because the latter was filled with a myriad of species that were enemies of each other. Many of them were prey to many others and many were predators to many others.
It was absolutely impossible for all these species to join hands and unite into a single force.
And yet, exactly that had happened from the very moment the Beast Incursion began.
Not only did they not frenzy at each other, but they set aside their ecological enmity and hostilities and cooperated in a united frenzied warfront that looked like a child's conception of ecology.
And yet, the deaths of hundreds of millions of humans and many Martial Artists were a chilling reminder that it was all real.
"…And that concludes all emergency intelligence that we have been able to gather in the one hour since the Beast Incursion began," the Director of Intelligence ended his emergency briefing to leading powers of the Kandrian Empire. "This is intel we have garnered from intelligence brokers, including the Beggar's Sect, which has become extremely cooperative, as well as our own long-range surveillance and intel from hit allies."
The air boiled with peril and horror as the devastating news that the man delivered to everybody weighed down on the atmosphere.
The director turned to Emperor Rael whose expression had crumbled with grave reckoning. "We have roughly a day before the Beast Incursion reaches us, Your Majesty."
Emperor Rael closed his eyes.
"Keep the citizens of the Kandrian Empire in evacuation, do not lift the national emergency we declared for the final battle between the seventy-five Sages. We are in an even greater emergency than before, and…"
His eyes opened with determination.
"Contact the Elder Tree. I want to know what an insider has to offer about all this apocalypse."
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